Christine Negroni riffs on aviation and travel and whatever else inspires her to put words to page.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Did Pilot Trash Talk Air Canada?

Paul Strachan on CBC's Lang & O'Leary

Airline pilots at Air Canada may deserve raises, but will someone please stop the union chief Paul Strachan from continuing to imply that high salaries equal safety? He is not representing his fellow pilots, his airline or his case well at all.

The pilots are engaged in a bitter contract dispute with the airline and Capt. Strachan's appearance on CBC News program Lang and O’Leary Exchange last month was an attempt to explain why the pilots' pay demands are reasonable. He offered up this retort to the Air Canada’s claim that of the 500 highest paid Air Canada employees 450 of them are pilots. "That's the way it should be. Who are the highest paid employees at a hospital?"

The idea of Dr. Captain is not what got the airline executives in a tizzy, though. It was when Strachan suggested that questionable work is performed at the Aeroman maintenance facility in El Salvador, where several U.S. airlines send their Airbus products for maintenance. If Air Canada sends its planes southward to join US Airways, JetBlue and Southwest Airlines, now that Air Canada’s own maintenance operation Aveos, has gone belly up, Canadian travelers should be worried, Strachan suggests. Aveos owns of a large chunk of Aeroman.

“The typical maintenance worker at Aeroman, makes 15,000 $16,000 a year,” he told Lang and O’Leary. “Is this the person you want working on your airplane?” he asked before quickly answered his own question, “I suspect not.”

Air Canada’s flight operations director Rick Allen is apoplectic over the interview and he is demanding that Strachan take it back or lose his job. He also wants CBC to remove the video. (Good luck with that!) But Strachan counters that he didn’t do anything wrong. "Is the airline safe? Of course it's safe," he told the Financial Post. "I didn't make any reference to Air Canada in particular.”

Well he sure led the interviewers toward that conclusion. Kevin O’Leary asked him at one point, "Are you destroying your brand?"

"The brand is us," Capt. Strachan said smugly.

There are legitimate issues raised by the laying off of twenty-six hundred Canadian mechanics, especially with no decision yet made about where the airline will send its planes for repairs. But watching Strachan’s high-handed performance makes unemployed Canadian and modestly paid Salvadorian mechanics seem like supporting characters in a negotiation drama where pilots are the stars.

Strachan plays the safety card with a heavy-hand. One hopes he keeps a lighter touch on the stick.